A work order may be defined as either an order received by a business or organization from a client or an order created internally within the business or organization. Generally, a work order may contain the client's information, describe the work to be performed, a task priority, and the job procedure to be followed. Accordingly, the work order may be for products or services and, thus may also include information such as the quantity of the product to be manufactured, built or fabricated, the price and amount of material to be used, the types of labor required, payment structure and rate (e.g., on an hourly basis, on a unit basis, etc.), the total amount of hours worked, etc. In addition, the work order may be, for example, a maintenance or repair request from clients external to the business or from personnel within the business.
An engineering work order (“EWO”) may be described as a document used to initiate an engineering investigation, engineering design activity and/or engineering modifications to an item of equipment. Typically, EWOs may be utilized within the telecommunication industries and utility companies. An EWO may allow engineers to produce new designs and maintain a facility model, while enforcing business rules and network connectivity as the engineering work is being performed. Typically, telecommunication industries and utility companies maintain a geographic, connectivity, and financial database of facilities based on the changes made with EWOs. However the process for creating, assigning and managing the EWOs to posters to maintain this database is a purely manual process of printing each job, creating a physical folder for each job, manually determining which job to work on next, manually assigning the job and physically, routing the job to one of a poster, a problem resolution member, a quality review member, etc.